Aquinas, Philosophy, and Stuff w/ Fr. Gregory Pine

g'day father gregory how do do well good to have you in studio hey delighted to be thanks are you living in dc now i am yeah for the summer oh okay that's why so in dominican land you can be assigned directly or indirectly i'm assigned directly in washington dc and then indirectly by reason of study in freiburg switzerland sweet yeah uh how's it been how's that how's the doctorate been is it progressing yeah it is is it as hard as people say so i think the thing that's hard about it is like looking in the mirror and realizing the only one that's not making the doctorate happen is you you're like ah yes it's me i am the enemy um no it's good so in the american system you have like classes to take and then exams and candidacy and then a proposal on the prospectus and then the writing and then the subsequent defense whereas in the european system it's just like you propose something at the outset to a person that person says yes and the understanding is like you kind of are already motivated by the project so you just go to write that sounds like a better option it's great easier yeah yeah i mean there's a formation obviously that comes with classes and exams and stuff and it ensures a kind of consistency among doctoral candidates we're in the european system it's just like mixed nuts man and i'm just picking out the brazil nuts each time um so uh yeah so it's great insofar as you know with like house of studies stuff i've studied st thomas a decent bit so if i were to have another couple years of classes i might be like yeah um so i'm glad just to be able to write which is awesome good stuff and i just heard from father bonaventure pon adventure yeah that you all had a godsplitting retreat we did tell me about that yeah so we went to huntington new york um i slow it down pronunciation because there's t's and there's d's and i don't know which ones are soft and which ones are hard so i just make them all sound silly yeah that's way different you don't want to say huntington no you wouldn't want that hunting i think it's hunting maltese okay yep my bad we'll make this a clip for sure d's and d's um so heart and soft pronunciation having been overcome uh so it's this place on the north ish shore of long island it's an old seminary called immaculate conception that was the seminary for the diocese of rockville center and it's beautiful they have made up number of acres 240 acres i mean that's definitely the right number yeah and so we had people come from all over there's a person from brazil person from hawaii a person from there are a lot of people from texas wow i was sitting at a table on saturday night and i think the majority of people at a table of 10 were from texas i was like god bless how has god blessed this state so manifestly like you guys are testimony to his peculiar love and it was great i mean it looked like a retreat so yeah mass confession adoration divine office some talks a lot of time to hang out smoke cigars drink beer is great um i really i really want to do other pints for the quinas retreat yeah let me know let me know if that that's a possible place to go because my first idea was let's just do a pint of the quinoa street people can stay at the hotel we'll have scott come here give a few lectures and we'll all just sit around smoking cigars angrily drink pounding espresso that's my idea of a good time that is a good time yeah i think having a bunch of people together who are angry is a very powerful experience it is i went to a philadelphia 76ers game uh recently with my brother and i was like here are 19 000 of my closest angriest friends i just felt so embraced by speaking of angry conferences michael voris texted me a few weeks ago and he's like hey you want to speak at this upcoming conference i think what is i don't know what's called it's not like sick and tired he's like the bishops are gonna hate it i'm like why would you think that would make me into this what do you think about me that i but i'm like i i was busy so i said no but um got it yes my wife why would my wife be calling i don't know you can take what happens right that's what she says hello oh gosh oh hey hey i'm i'm doing a live stream right now can i call you back bye that could have been so bad what if my wife was super angry yeah it's hard to say how that could have gone it was my it was my son but i just thought it'd be longer yeah yeah yeah no that was great yeah you're right you've ruined me as a father and i'm just looking at our video 164 people watching this chat is for us it's not for them it's got nothing to do with them i don't yeah let's go yeah yeah yeah yeah so angry people in the same retreats uh treats people in the same room yes so this place is beautiful and the staff there were like motivated to help us which is cool is this upstate new york so it's like you go to new york city and then you go out on long island for 25 minutes and then you just bop north for a bit okay and um so they have a a commanding view of lloyd harbour if i were writing the tourism video for it uh and they just have like a lot of greenery a lot of nice walks they're building this kind of water worky amphitheater which sounds like a strange concept but it looked like they had terraced this part of their property so as to accommodate people for outdoor seating but then it also looked like they had some water features running through it so i'm excited to see how is it like a catholic family that just so it's the diocese of rockville centre i think that just continues to run it and sweet yeah was it a charming place yeah yeah good yeah i mean it's old timey so you get into your room and to turn on your bathroom light you do this thing one of these numbers and then you sit on your bed the bell rings oh crud yeah right exactly you sit on your bed and it folds in half and embraces you but in like a good way no actually it was it was just like very simple but in a kind of monastic simplicity like undistracting simple and then they have air conditioning window units which need to be on full blast in the middle of july if you're going to have any chance of sleeping but those are all the negative things yeah and i pitched them all as positive things so i would go back okay is it hot in here a little hot do you want to crack that door just a smidge yeah sure what are the chances that i upset that camera decent no it's uh it's on auto focus so it'll get weird until you just just just smash it okay yeah come i got peter craft coming in on the fourth that's awesome and i can't have him be dying dying i can't have him die i'm really gonna get this place cooler some kind of vent happening but okay cool and have you all done your domestic institute conference yet yeah so the ti had maybe six conferences this summer so they have a few regularly recurring ones the aquinas philosophy workshop is one that people might be interested in it's ordinarily in newburgh new york this year it was in greenville south carolina at st mary's parish i don't know if you've heard of father j scott newman but he'd be a great guy to have on the show just he's awesome um and his parish is beautiful when the bishop assigned him there the bishop said i want you to go here he said cool just as long as you leave me there and we should say he was like maybe yes yes um so he's been there he's been there for 21 years and as a result of the continuity he's built a lot of i mean he in kind of coordination with the parish community the parish has built beautiful things uh both like on the human scale and on the developmental scale so you like they have like a school and then another school and then they have a big parish center and then that now they're building a new church and they're they're like very engaged it's not just like a catholic for us but they're also engaged with the wider community and um it's awesome it's really cool to see so we were there that was great aquinas philosophy workshop and then the ti had a bunch of other conferences i plugged into one called chivitas day which is not pro chibitati day just a different one um i don't know what any of those things are yeah it doesn't matter um so it's like faith in public life and tom hibbs who teaches at baylor university and then philip bess who teaches at notre dame and then father original lynch each gave lectures on art meaning in the public square which was sweet interesting yeah so it spawned or it encouraged spawn sounds like aliens coming out of people's arms like um it encouraged a lot of really excellent conversation among a lot of really cool people so i help with those too and then since then they've had a couple other ones but i haven't had as much to do with them hey speaking of art and public square what do you think i mean have you spent much time thinking about how it is that people like our age and younger like really are wanting a traditional liturgy a beautiful liturgy yeah like i'm here in steubenville and people my age it felt like 15 years ago were doing what i was doing like the guitar masses and things like that and the kind of charismatic carries a lot of baggage but that kind of prayer and now i think all of us are just like traditional and it leads me to think did we do we just grow naturally and this is a good thing is this a pendulum thing was that a fad and if that was a fat is this a fad yeah yeah yeah that's a great question um so i think that all of us have a kind of lingering fear of arbitrarity you're not as conscious of it when you're little you know but you don't want to like show up for a thing that isn't going to last right because it's like is this here because it's good or is this here because someone randomly chose that it be here that's kind of like abstract way to describe it but this idea of the pendulum swinging i think that there's a sense in which the pendulum is bound to swing right and i think that there's a kind of healthy ecclesial and liturgical sentiment to like well how do we cultivate a common life of worship you know of prayer that can actually be handed on you know and here i think about the way that chesterton describes tradition he says he gives this example this is a paraphrase but if you come to a fence in the woods right you got to know better what it keeps in or what it keeps out before you tear it down so i think that there's there's something good to be said for recovering tradition but trying to recover tradition in a way that's organic rather than contrived so i think sometimes just people exercise the preferential option for the ancient so because it's old it's good but without necessarily evaluating the reasons for which it didn't last so i think that um that's got to be part of the conversation there are these good things on offer we tried other things and it didn't seem to have worked as well so if we go back to the good things that we're on offer we need to be critically conscious of the reasons for which they weren't fully received right so good because i think a lot of us think of like the the the traditions prior to vatican ii it's like it was great there were some idiots now it's bad yeah like it must be a little more nuanced than that surely yeah no it is and i think that that's that's part of the part of the way by which to better appreciate the second vatican council like people just think sometimes they'll look at it and they'll just be like all bad but i don't think it's sufficient to say like well have you read the documents that's kind of like a well actually type response but i think it's good to have to be critically conscious of the ways in which uh things before the council weren't ideal right uh or were lacking or limited i mean church even church architecture people just assume in 1965 everything got bad but a lot of ugly churches were built in the 1950s okay so like what's what's the reason for that i mean church architecture is kind of just downstream of wider architectural movements and modernism had already creeped into the american city and as a result of which like for instance this building that you're in i imagine is on the historical register the only reason the historical register exists is because of modernism right the only reason for which cities started saying we need to preserve certain buildings is because they realized that they didn't have a coherent vision of what a city looked like and they were like kind of reeling when things started disappearing and they weren't replacing them with durable beautiful structures and so they're just kind of grabbing at straws so that's a way to approach tradition but it's a way that approach approaches tradition with a kind of um frantic spirit it's like yeah so i don't think that we want to be like that we don't want to just push things on the historical register because we're afraid of them disappearing but we lack a substantive vision of what's good in its place so yeah when it comes to the second vatican council i think that it's good to be aware of the history that leads up to it and american catholic history is fascinating for this reason i don't know if you know everyone's like read whatever david treasurer what's his name david tracey ellis john tracey ellis ellis no tracy hard to say uh and this guy perco francis perko there's a couple of books out there from the mid 20th century mid late 20th century about being catholic and being american what that looks like how it went and it gives you yeah it gives you a deeper sense of how very fraught was that relationship um and then that helps you to contextualize people like john courtney murray you know talking about religious liberty and things like that yeah so those are some random spit poly thoughts uh have you ever read love in the ruins by walker percy if i'm remembering correctly there were the church was like fragmented into different kind of warring sections and if i'm not mistaken there was the american church which was headquartered in i think the vatican was in uh st louis and they were celebrating the tridentine mass and they would sing the star-spangled banner or something like that i'm like um because it i i try to be critical about like okay i live in america now yeah like i'm even aware that i have different opinions about you know what governments should and shouldn't be doing you know compared to when i was living in australia and i'm trying to figure out is that just because i've kind of grown and thought about this more is that just because i've drunk the kool-aid um but something similar too like with my love of tradition and the latin mass and things like that it's i wonder i wonder how much of it is due to this kind of what do they call it like fluid modernity or where we don't have any kind of heritage we're not sort of connected with any sort of tradition i wonder if that's part of why ancestry.com is such a massive thing that we just we want to be grounded somewhere what if that's part of our longing to return to something stable yeah no that's i think that's a good point that is a good point i think that um where so i think that sometimes recovery of tradition bridges on nihilism because what you have there is a is a choice for something but you aren't receiving that thing in the ordinary way so ordinarily a tradition is handed down yes yes right there's a kind of continuity and you are normalized right you're kind of made a member of that community as you receive its tradition so like thinking about the dominican right maybe you go to a dominican parish when you're a kid you grow up learning how to serve the dominican right maybe uh you know just a roman right like a diocesan priest comes to fill in when your priests are at their provincial chapter or something like that and you realize there's something different to it and you're like huh you know you start comparing those differences and you have a kind of critical conscience as to how your experience is distinct and then maybe good better or you know you can you can appreciate it as distinct and then as you're thinking about becoming a priest maybe at 18 19 20 you're like you know the guys in my parish were this way i i benefited from their pastoral service maybe it makes sense i like love their saints i love the way in which they pray and then you kind of step into that yeah and then you're taught to celebrate the dominican right and it's something for you that's already part of your memory of life it's something that you grew up with it's something that shaped your sunday mornings it's something that's kind of natural yeah exactly it's organic and so when you begin to celebrate it's not like you know let's stick it to the novus ordo folks it's just like this is who i am and i have reasons for it but some of those reasons yeah they're not the type of reasons that i could argue out in systematic fashion they're like reasons that are part of my family life and my church life and my general ecclesial life so um yeah i think that whenever you have a rupture in the communication of a tradition then it always problematizes the way that you go back and then recover a thing because it's just like it's awkward is this an aesthetic choice right is this a political choice what kind of choice is this and and i don't know that we're entirely capable of purifying our intentions or having unmixed motivations when we bring that about but it just it's hard right and i think that we need to acknowledge at the outset that it is hard but i think you see a lot of tlm communities do that well and do that beautifully and it's not just like we're going to have a ton of kids to out populate the atheists you know they're like they genuinely welcome life's life into their families and they make of it a gift to their parish community you know to their school community to you know and it's it's awesome it's an invitation it's an invitation to a bigger beautiful way of going about things yeah i had this idea and i think i shared this with scott in our interview that almost like reclaiming tradition there's going to be an awkwardness to it it's almost like going to going to an antique store and choosing something that will now be a family heirloom that you will now be passing down it's like it's not really yours but you're making it yours and there's a natural awkwardness to that yeah and i think maybe that's kind of what we see sometimes when we complain about traditionalists or when people complain about traditionalists it's like it's bound to be awkward in the beginning when you're reclaiming something that you think was taken from you yeah yeah and i think too it's we feel at like at this juncture of our modern lives like if it's reasonable you have to be able to give arguments for it but i don't think that's true i think a thing can be reasonable for reasons that you can't necessarily express like st thomas will say that a little old woman knows more of the faith and the wisest of philosophers because it's given to her by faith and so she can hear father get up there and say you know the father creates the son and the father and the son create the holy spirit she's like i don't i don't know the technical language that sounds weird you know she's got a sense of the faith and as a result of which she can sniff out error and she knows the type of preaching by which she's nourished and she's able to sort the wheat in the chaff but she can't necessarily give you arguments as to why it's problematic to say that the father creates the son you know but she'd prefer that you say begets or you know generates but you know she can't quite put a finger on that pulse and i think that when we're covering tradition uh so when it's a matter of recovering tradition and people kind of come at you and say like why are you doing this you know give state your reasons it's hard because we we don't have access to the ordinary organic ways in which reasonableness is communicated like this is a part of my family this is a part of my worshiping experience this is a part of my tradition um because those reasons they just haven't come they haven't come to you in the ordinary mode and so you feel like you have to give arguments for it like it's better for reasons one through seventeen and i will now enumerate them and you know kind of indexical fashion it's like uh yeah i just don't know it's tough there's also situations where you encounter like i was talking to scott hahn yesterday he he's always telling me not to name drop i'm just joking but uh he said he was at a baptism a traditional latin mass and how glorious it was i guess you put salt in the child's mouth for some reason that i know not but um i think when you encounter that you see that it is objectively superior to what we're doing in most parishes and i think you can make that judgment even if you're not sure why you're making it like you can make the judgment that all things being equal it would be better to have a marble altar than a card table yeah you know like one just seems more fitting right even if it's just because it's not common and it's more expensive to make and seems prettier like even if those are your reasons yeah and i think just like you can do that with physical objects you can do that with other things like that music seems more appropriate to this thing in that we're doing uh that that that baptism seems more appropriate it seems to it seems to reveal what's taking place more fully in a way that this one doesn't yeah so i guess within bounds i agree with that line of argumentation because you can play that in a way where a baptism now takes an hour and 15 minutes you know it's more fitting that you have 216 pre-baptismal anointings it's like i don't know you know maybe there's something good for the simplicity of it so i just celebrated an extraordinary form baptism maybe two weekends ago which is awesome but it looks very similar to the what's the whole thing going on it's just like it's like you bless salt to exercise salt and it's part of these preparatory rights which are like exorcisms effectively yeah so it's uh there's this recognition all right so in the kind of catechumenal way of the ancient church a lot of people that were being baptized would have been participants of pagan rights right so there'd be real concern there over demon worship and so there are these extended rights at the outset for the sake of exorcism and so you know you exercise you bless and exercise the salt and then you put it on the child's tongue in a certain sense to associate that with like the bitterness basically of a past life of hedonism right but it's so it's a preparatory right but then there are these other both preparatory rights and explanatory rights to come after most of which are exactly the same in the extraordinary form and then in the ordinary form so like the ephitha for instance so where you would make a sign of the cross over the child's nose and ears um that's also so it's just kind of straight up in the old right and in the new right and i don't you know i'm not like kind of making a side-by-side comparison of the different prayers as they're uttered or of the liturgical gestures if there's significant differences between them but just kind of having celebrated both my feel for it this is how i've kind of come to understand it but like you know you have the pre-baptismal anointing with the oil of catechumens you have the post-baptismal anointing with the chrism you have the clothing in the white garment you have the handing on of this candle you know so like a lot of it looks very similar so there aren't huge changes but that one with salt is one of them and it reflects more the fact that there is you know our battle is not with flesh and blood it's with when it's with principalities and powers and so we need to be cognizant of the fact that there are demons right there's the evil one there are demons they want you to go to hell and we need to kind of mark you for christ and expel those those powers at the outset which is a real thing and it's a good thing and i think that we can affirm that but i don't want to say as a result of which we should spend another 25 minutes doing these that's a good point yeah because if your argument is it's it's more beautiful and more intricate it's like well where does that end well let's make it more beautiful and more intricate baby you have no idea how intricate this is about to be yeah exactly three-hour baptism don't you see how much more beautiful it is now that's that's a fair point i was actually complaining to my wife last night about what i call kind of a piety creep within the rosary so it's like you finish your decade and now there's 18 extra prayers that we've all added in and so the rosary now takes an hour instead of 20 minutes and i find that infuriating but i also find it difficult to explain why i'm upset about praying without sounding without sounding without sounding like a jerk yeah so it's almost like we have this idea like if it's longer it's better yeah which is interesting because the rosary first came to us just with that first half hail mary full of grace always blessed out the one blessed is real on jesus that was it and have we talked about this before this is one of my things yeah i have like five so this is one of them um yeah like that was how that's that's how well uh people prayed the rosary until when the black plague i think that was that the other half was added i've heard it attributed to alan de la roche which would be like yeah black plague 15th century i think like some of the first black plagues are 14th century but it keeps going for like another 200 years but it makes you you okay now i see why louis de montfort could get on his knees and pray 150 hail mary's because he wasn't praying 100 prayers in between each decade he was only playing half the hail mary you know and then i thought to myself if the hail mary was originally three times as long i feel like there would be some circles in which there would be this desperate tradition to return to that the original way of praying it but no one would do that because it's shorter i don't know if it's because we have this sort of shorter is not as good not as pious so we shouldn't be going back to how it was originally prayed yeah no i but a good response to that is okay but then there's those same traditional people who who wouldn't go back to something that was shorter but would go back to it if it was longer aren't necessarily praying like the uh luminous mysteries yeah which is additional so they're not saying necessarily pray four dec four rosaries today so so like a principled thought and then a practical thought principle thought being that i think that prayer should be on a human scale so it's for god for divine worship but it's to lead us through divine worship to god so saint thomas will say why the sacraments why do we why do we have the sacraments as we have them specifically why do we use physical things to communicate you know spiritual realities and he says that's how we learn right we go from the body well basically we go from experience to physical things to experience of uh spiritual things yeah what's more known to us to what's less known and then he talks about how it's humbling we stand by we sinned by pride originally so it's good that we be humbled having to kind of stoop to pick up humble things in order to be exalted and then he says it's good that we take hold of something unless we fall into idolatry because we're going to take hold of something so it's better that we take hold of sacraments so i think that the sacraments are accommodated to us as human beings and then just the sacramental life of the liturgical life more broadly so as a result of which prayers should be on a human scale right they should be ennobling so they should challenge us in a certain way but they should also not be overly burdensome such that we flee from them because then we're gonna we're gonna find something else we're gonna find an idol yeah and so i think with the rosary it's good to have that sensibility and there's always going to be a little bit of back and forth between too short and too long but we're going to we're going to find a human scale in our historical meanderings so in the dominican kind of tradition as it were we just get right into it so you know you typically pray the rosary you say the the apostles creed the father the three hail mary's glory be and then you say you start with first decade we basically start with um a half of a hail mary so the first half of the hail mary is you just described yeah and then lord open my lips and then god come to my assistance and then a glory be and then first decade so you just launch and at the end we typically don't say the same michael prayer yeah yeah so we just end with i've actually been making an effort to kind of like take out those extra prayers yeah like and partly because i have four kids that don't have an attention span yeah so we will just begin with the first decade um pray i don't even add the fatima prayer we're just doing the yeah we also remove the fatima or we don't we never added the fatima prayer so in a certain sense you can hearken back to a time during which it was not part of the rosary yeah but but it does sound a little bit impious when you explain it to some people and you don't want it to sound nimbus but it's just like i can tell you that if the rosary lasts 13 minutes or 13 to 15 minutes this is what it does in community then more people will come right but if it lasts i mean unless you put them kind of under grave obligation to come as it were but if it lasts 17 19 21 minutes a lot of guys are just going to pray the rosary on their own yeah because they'll find it to be more prayerful because it's just easier to get frustrated in a community where you have a lot of things attached and the same thing with the mass so like the dominican right for instance has been kind of in ongoing conversation with the roman right and the holy father will sometimes say you guys gotta you know add this to your calendar you gotta change this to whatever and like the prayers at the end of mass right so you'll pray um you know like saint michael prayer the hail holy queen you'll say some implications of the sacred heart you know things like that so the dominican right just never incorporated that and the reason isn't because dominicans are impious but it's just like mass should be about you know 23 to 25 minutes what i'm doing on my phone right now is looking at what aquinas has to say about prayer and he's asking whether prayer should last a long time i'm gonna just try and see if i can if i can get to this here we speak about prayer in two ways first by considering it in itself secondly by considering its cause the cause of prayer is the desire of charity what does that mean uh so he talks about prayer as interpretive as a dairy so like it interprets our desires so it wells up as a result of love yeah that's where from that's where he says that's where ought to arise from and this and this desire ought to be in us continually either actually or virtually for the virtue of this desire hissing virtually you think like internet today what do you mean by virtually like present in a higher way okay so like present in a power i love this from aquinas or from augustine from this point of view prayer ought to be continual wherefore augustine says faith hope and charity are by themselves a prayer of continual longing that's nice it is you dab it like that [Laughter] um and sorry here's the main point but prayer considered in itself cannot be continual i love the practicality of aquinas because we have to be busy about other works translation company at all times i've got stuff to do right yeah sorry continue no i was just gonna say so he'll say you know you gotta sleep in the most basic way but you also gotta take out the trash and so prayer ought to be conducted habitually yes yeah so it becomes that prayer should last long enough to arouse the fervor of the interior desire and when it exceeds this measure so that it cannot be continued any longer without causing weariness it should be discontinued yeah like again that sounds impious but it's not it's taking into account our human nature really i love it yeah boom yeah so i think that um same time i mean it's just a kind of sane anthropological point that you should love praying in a kind of basic way it doesn't mean that you should only pray when you feel good about it because there's there are other comparable experiences in human life which i think help to bring out the point what does it mean to love like so you love your children right and when your children are sick you would tend to their needs when your children are happy you would tend to their needs when your children are whatever kind of like fill out the rest of the details you're going to tend to them but it's going to be adapted to time place and circumstance um but like the baseline is that you love your children and then you perform different acts corresponding to the different places or the different times or the different settings and i think that prayer is like that so we want to cultivate a habitual given-ness to god right to have god as our end to love him with our whole mind heart soul and strength but that that kind of breaks forth in act throughout the course of the day throughout the course of our lives but in such a way where we're not like making of the other individual a personal project like i am going to be present to you my young son every minute of every day so that you know how very much i love you it's like your son's like i know you know i know you love me this much not this much we refer to that as helicopter parenting yeah exactly and we see that as a negative thing yeah so you don't want to like that it doesn't have to be smothering with respect to another human being but with respect to god you can think about it in the sense that like um you want to have an experience of god that is one of like a kind of genuine exchange one that's a like of a real friendship and if you're always motivated by anxiety you're just going to associate your relationship with god as an anxiety-filled somewhat traumatic experience of like boredom and tedium which isn't good right so maybe yeah that kind of introducing that human analogy is helpful for saying you got the baseline love which is habitual and then it breaks forth into these different acts but the acts you know they should they should continue as long as it's necessary as it were sweet i got another pensive beard yeah you know speaking of the kind of flip flop or the pendulum swing thing pendulum swing thing um i i do think too there there might be something uh in regards to how we speak about hell today that might be a result of the pendulum swing maybe talk about that for a bit but you know we constantly talk about not hearing homilies about hell yeah but what's interesting is i also can't remember how many homies i've heard about heaven yeah yeah it's almost like we're just dull people who can't imagine one way or the other how good or how terrible things could be i don't know but but i wonder if as a result of that there is this push to be like everyone's going to hell uh faustina is a joke like the divine mercy thing that's just that's that's uh do people say that oh yeah have you heard this yikes yeah this is one of those and this is one of these bad trad things you know like i understand that trads online are different to trads in parishes and we don't want to kind of confuse the two but yeah like right now i'm sure in the live chat there's probably some people who are like modern ass joke things like that and i wonder though if she spent her time talking about everyone going to hell if they'd be doing that i don't know if they would they'd either just leave it alone or they'd totally get behind it yeah but it seems to me that like we live in such confusing times not just in society but in the church like we need this message of the mercy of god more than ever but you know i it's been my experience where if i devote an episode to the mercy of god there's a lot of people who like try to correct me fascinating i'm like no we should we should preach the gospel in season out of season so even if you think it's out of season we still need to be talking about the mercy of god because there are certain people who need to hear that all of us need to hear that but um yeah what what's your opinion on that i mean i know you live in a different world to me the tower of academia and all that but have you have you encountered this like i mean i live in the tower of self-imposed ignorance um which is like well whatever um that's where we should have the retreat yeah there you go so i okay so first thought is this i don't think the hom this is not your main point but maybe i'm just going to take the opportunity to say it yeah i don't think the homily is the place to address many things right because i think the one of the principal virtues of a homily is that it proposes god for contemplation right but i think that in order to propose god for contemplation you need to be attuned to this fact that we just covered about prayer right that it should be accommodated to a person's attention and i think that for a daily mass homily three to four minutes is good for a sunday homily i think maybe seven to ten minutes is good and i think that there are certain doctrines that you can't teach well in a compact unit of speech without potentially upsetting more people than you actually console help encourage instruct admonish etc right so there are some things which are just by virtue of the present political climate kind of incendiary kind of upsetting and i don't think that you should touch those things in such a way where your expectation would be more to upset than to encourage does that make of you a coward i'm sure some people think that it does i don't because i think that if you preach the gospel right if you preach god and you preach as christ you preach the mysteries of you know the trinity of the incarnation you preach the mysteries of the redemption and the dispensation of grace that you're going to start getting people in other contexts where you're able to catechize them instruct admonish in a way that's more adequate and then you can begin taking on these more controverted issues in a way so that the other person doesn't feel like the homily has become a political space where they are now better disposed to receive the teaching so i just don't think that a homily is always going to be the space in which it's best or most appropriate to address certain concerns there are things like in the american church especially where i think it's good to preach a couple times a year about abortion um but i'm not sure how often or if one ought to preach about gender ideology or same-sex attraction or things like that yeah for instance um i just i'm kind of on unsettled mind and i can be of unsettled mind because i don't have care of souls i'm not preaching to the same congregation week in and week out so i don't have to make these types of pastoral decisions so it's like easy for you to say punk kid i mean point but um yeah but i was in a parish for like a year and a half and i thought about it during that time and i made the decisions that i did which i just reflected so then when it comes to like things that you describe things that have become politicized i think that you're always going to have people from either direction characterizing your speech in a certain way shape or form so you know i don't i don't know if people read comments but i suspect that comment boxes are kind of terrible a terrible place in which to encounter this type of acrimony but i think that you start with god right in the sound like you would say that start with god but you start with god and then you move on from there not in the sense that you leave god behind but that you explain everything in light of god so mercy for instance saint thomas talks about it in a non-political setting right it's in the prima paris it's in considerations which pertains to the one god and he goes through those things that have kind of ruled out creaturely limitations so he'll say for instance he's simple which is to say he's undivided he'll say he is you know infinite which is to say he's not limited he'll say you know and then he moves into things pertinent to god's intellect and will and when talking about the will he talks about love and justice and he talks about mercy and there he just does the very simple work of saying like what is mercy you see a sorrowful state a miserable state and then you work to alleviate it in the human case of the kind of like the exhibiting of mercy you're struck by that sorrowful state so that startful state causes you misery of heart and then that in a certain sense motivates that pity motivates your response in god's case there is no pity right because god doesn't have passions in the way that we have passions god pre-contains them right virtually super eminently so he has all the perfections proper to what we experience in our passionate life but he does alleviate those things in the way that's most efficacious and excellent because with respect to god everything is inferior right and mercy is from a superior to an inferior not to say that like if i you know perform some active mercy for another individual then i am superior to them qui individual it's just with respect to this particular difficulty right so that's eminently true of god so we're talking about mercy we're talking about something that's metaphysically thick now mercy may have been co-opted by certain voices on the right or on the left and made into something which is more or different than that and then as a result of which people have a kind of reaction against it in discourse they'll say it is what doesn't such a person made of it okay and especially this has been true like in the last five to seven years has mercy has become a buzzword and i think that we want to stay kind of clear of that politicization of discourse insofar as we can't permit our language we can't permit our concepts to be co-opted by contemporary political debates we need to like retain them in their metaphysical thickness and use them as they are meant to be used but taking every opportunity to clarify our use of those terms so people don't think that we're falling into political tropes not because we're insecure but because we want to give people access to the actual things that are being described so that they don't kind of cut off their humanity from the full breadth and depth of god's riches and if god isn't merciful then we've got ourselves an incredibly huge problem because that means that god doesn't act as superior vis-a-vis inferior in a way so as to alleviate sorrow which means that we're just a bunch of like half-bred infants wallowing in a pool of our own filth which is yikes so yeah i would say reclaim the discourse propose it in a way that's coherent that's loving right and then try to bring back bring people back into a conversation that embraces both right and left and i think you're good at this i think you're good at like having conversations with people with whom you might not agree on every point but like kind of holding back i think cancel culture has made it very very difficult to host conversations among people who may differ on points substantive or accidental so encouragement keep killing it hmm yeah thank you yeah yeah what are some ways that you've tried to help people understand the depth and breadth of a particular term that may have been co-opted i mean it is words like that mercy justice jet excuse me well gender is a relatively new word i suppose in the sense of but um yeah sex i mean what can you think of kind of words that you've had to help your flock understand yeah i think my i feel very motivated by the desire to reclaim the word god and to claim the word jesus yeah because i think it starts in that most kind of fundamental place i think when people hear god they hear all kinds of just gonna ask you that what do you think people i mean this is a general question but what do you think people typically think of when they think of god and how should they think of god yeah i think yeah nice i think when people typically think of god they think of the one who threatens to punish their lifestyle which in the christian dispensation is called sinful but which they have experienced as less difficult than struggling amen what a beautiful way to put it yeah and i think god ought to be proposed um not you know like not principally as punisher not because god doesn't punish or mete out justice in accord with you know the just desserts of those who commit transgression but i think that if you if you bring the conversation back to like you know this sounds like such a nerd thing but primo powers questions two and three just like start with the fact that god is but in a way that is more philosophically informed right to kind of like get some of that on the table not because people need to think that the five ways obtain or they need to be impressed by the rigor of their logic but they need to think about god as the one who moves you know the sun and the stars to use dante's language before they think about them as one who punishes transgression right god who i'm thinking about dave potencia question three article seven which i just blah blah who cares backstory no one gives a rip um but god who gives us to be who conserves us in being god who gives us to act and conserves our act so this sense that god is the like the primogenitor of of being and of agency if you think about the very fact of our existence the very fact of our causing being itself god's gift you think about the fact that we are being on loan right but alone that god has promised never to renege upon because such is the nature of his divine consistency like those types of things i think are actually helpful and what i preach them in exactly those terms no but i think that you can preach them in terms which are receivable like that god has decided in you that it is good to be in this way right that god has decided in you that it is good to be in this way like each of us represents a distinct notion in god and like in the background you're thinking about prima paris question 15 and the divine ideas the fact that god knowing himself knows all of the ways in which his divine life can be participated in limited fashion right and you you spin that out and that means that god has notions of singulars which means that there is nothing that escapes god's knowledge or god's providence which means that when god conjoins his will to that not as like you know moment two after moment one of conceiving of it but just in the sense of god in willing himself wills us to be he wills us not just as part but he wills us as a whole of sorts which means that god doesn't love the you you are to become but that means that god loves you right god gives you nature god gives you grace in order to conduct you along that path of unfolding and of development but god loves you when you come i when i read brideshead revisit i was very struck by the fact that it seemed that lady marchman loved what her children could be rather than loving who they were yeah and you can see in god's choice to create as he has created that god loves you when jk testing talks about patriotism i mean as a kind of broader concept to embrace like just our approach to all of reality he's talks about this kind of broken down seaside resort in england called brighton and he says brighton will not be transfigured by like an urban planner brighton will not be transfigured by one who wishes it to be other than it is brighton will be transfigured by one who loves it for what it is steubenville let's go you know exactly what's happening now yeah yeah yeah so like and it's significant that a lot of the people that are investing in steubenville love it right they love what it is they love what it's doing they love the smell in the morning they love the smell of fried eggs yeah exactly you know so i think that like you start there and you can do a lot of conceptual therapy with just simple things like god right and um yeah i want i think that that discourse is obviously worth reclaiming because salvation hangs on it yeah gosh there's a lot there [Music] god loves us as we are and too much to leave us that way as i've heard dr han say yeah yeah yeah yeah you said something from bride's head revisited which i've never revisited since we haven't read it i haven't i i keep getting told to read it yeah you don't have to read it um but you just said that was really interesting about like this mother loved her children for what they could be not for what they were this happened to me recently i don't know if my kids will ever watch this episode but we were at this thing called catholic family land which is not like a lame knock-off of like disneyland it's a big you know acreage here in ohio where um families come together and camp celebrate mass hang out go in baseball tournaments swim in the pool it's pretty cool it's like kids just run wild you know and i was at mass and my kids were just um all over the show just talking and not kneeling [Music] hit a button is it back okay so yeah so i was just sitting there with the imperfection of my children and my own imperfection but not seeing that and one of my prayers was like lord i renounce the lie that my kids have to be perfect for me to be acceptable you know like that was the lie but just that yeah what you said that just really struck me i think a lot of us have that i don't know if it's our kids or reflections of us or whatever but like it's okay if my and i'm not saying they do but if my kid eats weird or if he walks funny or if he like has really bad allergies or something it's like ah i think as parents we can too often be concerned about what we want them to be as opposed to like loving them in the here and now yeah and we don't be loved like that like we want to be seen for the good that we do possess and for that to be brought forth yeah yeah no you think about it like well how do i think about it what i want is to be loved and to be trusted and i you know you learn that from your parents i think in a big way what it means to be loved and what it means to be trusted and to be loved and to be trusted gives you the encouragement it also gives you the freedom to grow into whatever your humanity uh to to exercise the virtuous life to become better in some recognizable way um but yeah i think it's just it's just most basic that your children know that you love them and that you trust them and uh yeah it's kind of a wild thing what do you say to people who are struggling with scrupulosity i i just was stopped by a father in the coffee shop this morning and he said that that new book i put out uh how to be happy um i have a lot i have a chapter there on scripture because that's something i dealt with in the past and he said it was a blessing to her i'm so happy to hear that because scrupulosity can be so crippling i think it's important to kind of distinguish between a sensitive conscience which we should all have but we don't want to offend our lord we should get to it get to that place where we love him like a friend we don't want to offend but scrupulosity is just it's killing a lot of people right now and i don't know if we're struggling like some people talk about it as a sort of variant of ocd like in a religious context and i think we can like fall into the trap of maybe maybe making a virtue out of scrupulosity and we ourselves think if i'm more scrupulous i'm more holy but this seems to be something i'm encountering people more often and then my fear is that all this kind of re-emphasis on hell and which again is hell exists people go to hell all of that but my fear is that it's just crippling people and and kind of preventing them from encountering the love of the lord so yeah what kind of advice do you give to those who come to you with scripturosity i have thoughts here we go so i think that god illumines our conscience in a kind of promissory note so he shows you certain limitations certain defects but with the intention of healing those things and of kind of growing you beyond them and i think that sometimes the illumination of conscience will outpace the working of grace in the sense that we become more acutely aware of our faults our limitations but without the complimentary or like the the companion sense that there's a grace that's operative in our life which grace can heal us which grace can elevate us and as a result of which there's a kind of despair that sets in and as you know like as a way to confront it we try to exercise control over the just the knowing of our conscience since we feel like there's no control over the the genuine healing and elevating beyond the limitations so my general sense is when talking about the life of sin and the life of virtue by which it ought to be replaced i think it's better to think about it as not so much a rooting out as it is a kind of crowding out so if you focus on rooting out sin from your life it can be a thankless task or a potentially infinite burden to bear because there's always weeds will always crop up if you think about just weeding your garden they're just they're just going to keep coming until such time as you fill those beds with big beautiful flowers with whatever perennials and annuals with a variety and a mixture of good things that make it so that the soil is being drawn upon for the reasons it was made rather than just kind of laying fallow and then you just find all these dandelions or mulberry trees and things just kind of filling it out because if you just focus on pulling it out pulling it out pulling that's all you end up doing yeah or as you focus on crowding it out then you're engaged in a more kind of productive enterprise and so i think that one you have to affirm the primacy of grace so god is the one who illumines conscience and god is the one who grows you beyond your limitations two you're never going to root out sin entirely from your life except as god gives you leave it's better to focus on crowding it out which means focusing on the virtuous life and that's not just like the power of positive thinking that's actually like think about god live with god like love god and those with whom he has made you to be um and then just kind of go from there and then um yeah you're you're never gonna have a firm handle on all of the different aspects or facets of the sin that still kind of uh wells up from within your heart and i think that you can kind of set that aside because if you make of it a personal project to understand it comprehensively it's just it's just punishing right so what am i saying like don't examine i'm not saying that but i'm saying examine your conscience within bounds so i think it's helpful in the practical way just to just to think about it in like okay i'm only going to examine my conscience with this frequency or for this length of time i'm only going to go to confession with this frequency and with this length of time i am um going to talk to a medical professional for at least this many sessions you know based on this recommendation and if i find it to have been effective i'll go back for up to this many you know but i'm also going to have an accountability partner with whom i talk you know maybe it's kind of like in an external forum type way i would just talk about the the basic things without getting too deep down because that might be potentially embarrassing and actually prevent me from doing the thing like i don't have to confront my shame like i think a lot of people will go to face-to-face confession because they were thinking you know i was thinking about going behind the screen but i knew that i had to confront my shame it's like you don't need to confront your shame yeah god will heal your shame you're not going to heal it of yourself you're not going to grow beyond it of yourself that's the work of grace and it's fine right it's fine to be behind the screen it's for you it ought to be as easy as it can be made to be so kind of keeping some of those things in mind yeah what's hard is when you have an australian accent and you're behind the screen and you know they know who you are there's been one time where i've put on an american accent nice hey there father he's like what's wrong with this guy wow yeah yeah or you do a south african accent that is the strangest accent it's weird it is strange yeah yeah i don't know what's more insulting saying weird or strange i was trying to go for the least of the insulting ones interesting yeah it's a different kind of accent it's remarkable i one of my favorite interactions here in america i love that we just went from scrupulosity to jokes i was going through some grocery store in san diego and the lady's like oh wow you're from australia yeah yeah and she said and it's because it was summer at the time she's like and it's cold there right now is it sorry about my accent i'm like yeah yeah yeah he has cold shoes and then she said and yet you call it summer and then there was this awkward pause where i was waiting for her to be like just joking but it didn't come so she thought that we caught our winter summer because that's what americans do and i let the awkwardness fall on her and then walked away nice and i've also had a situation where i was at a coffee shop this is still hard for me to understand maybe this guy was just like deep punking me i don't know but he said oh my gosh you're from australia we're about south australia oh my gosh do you know justin i really thought it had to be a joke because you know people joke about those sorts of things yeah yeah and i was waiting for him at least to say the last name and i still wouldn't have known bloody justin but he just looked at me and i went nope don't know oh justin no yeah so i've had that with europeans who ask if i you know you tell them you're from the united states like oh what part and i'll say i'm from between yeah you know washington dc and boston because i don't expect them to know our states because i don't know their states and yeah i have no anticipation that they would care more about america than i do about switzerland for instance yeah so i'll be like yeah i'm in between washington dc and new york and then just as soon as i've given a couple of people a handful of people that geographical location then they'll come back with do you know susan okay yeah yeah this is not this is not yes specifically american thing no i've gotten that before from europeans who are i think as a as a continent far more enlightened you know or at least they self-style this dutch and their interactions with foreigners so i don't think you have to worry about that he wasn't de-punking you i think he was just genuinely concerned crazy yeah he wanted to you wanted to establish common ground next time i'm gonna be like justin oh like with the with the face yeah and the the eyes and that hair yeah he's dead uh shame about justin yeah yeah yeah but i think i forget that i have an accent now it's kind of diluted a lot okay do you ever meet australians be like matt's not bloody australian he's english i haven't thought that no yeah i don't know that i can like distinguish all the time between new zealand australia south africa and you want to hear what my mum sounds like yeah sure my mum debbie is this this is like this is marco polo yeah you can keep talking while i find it right which reminds me of oh that's my sister sorry keep talking yeah keep be interesting quickly all right so here's let's see stop being interesting now i found it uh here's debbie here's debbie oh hi kiara i'm glad you received your twenty dollars it took so long to come then sent that over because you broke your arm and you've just been a brave little brave little soldier so there's debbie what does that sound like to you i have no idea what they're about to say here's here's gary don't they sound way more australian than me they do yeah yeah they do when i talk to them i start sounding more like that okay point is like when you move here from another country at first it's cute that people think you're different and sound whatever but after a while you just want people to understand you because you're in walgreens and you need this drink and you don't have time yeah well maybe this is this is an opportunity for bridge building in the sense that okay you think about the like lgbtq kind of movement and a lot of his accept us on the same footing wow sorry wow scrupulosity jokes about accents lbg yeah we're going back there all right so let's let's think about it this way so this is your experience of having an accent of being australian in the united states yep i have an experience it's not it's not the same and maybe it's comparable you can make that assessment being in switzerland no so this would be in the united states wearing a habit um a lot of times when when catholics talk about oh you know like you're religious it must be awesome you wear this great habit it must be such an awesome opportunity to evangelize wherever you are i don't experience it like that often okay so what i experienced it is so like one of the first times that my family visited me in washington dc we were walking around downtown and i looked back at my mom and my mom was just crying and i was like whoa what's going on and she's like do you see the way that they look at you is she sad she was just sad yeah because they looked at you like i'm freaking freaking yeah because i am yeah uh just in a very kind of particular context they didn't have to stay like exactly so i find myself often when i'm walking down the street you have two options which is just uh avoid eye contact and just content yourself with the fact that you are a freak or i try to actually grab people's eyes so people will look at me they're trying to make sense of it so they're looking at my rosary they're looking at my scapular they're looking at the fact that my habit evidently got caught in the escalator when i got off the metro because there's a lot of black grease on the bottom and then i just try to kind of grab their eyes and bring them to mind so i can have a human experience where like here i am you're right they keep walking or what i like yeah yeah yeah sometimes you know some and sometimes i get them and i'm like smile like you'll see through this yeah just like i'm here like i'm a human being and and oftentimes for me it's very dispiriting when i go to places which self style as everyone's welcome so i like hip hips or coffee shops i like my espresso to taste like tangy weird um and so i'll bop into this place in whatever town when i'm doing dust and such and that's the most specific sentence i've ever uttered and i'll go to a little hipster coffee shop and the breeze is there just looking awesome with a cool haircut sweet tattoos you know you know awesome outfit and i'm just like let's go and then that person will be like literally everyone is welcome here except for you they won't say that but their eyes will communicate like literally everyone is welcome here except for you and i'm like but i had this experience at this um coffee shop in louisville called safai and there was this awesome really sweet woman there who i subsequently met at a brandy distillery called copper and kings but that's for another day um and i walked in and she was genuinely delighted just by life i think in general and as a result of which her delight with life spilled over and to encounter with me and she's like hey what can i get for you and i was just like thank you i was like i could hug you over the counter right now you know and so i think that like we need so when you know hosting conversations i think you need to tap into that so you have your experience of being australian i have my experience of wearing a freak outfit um but i think a lot of people have experiences of being different that they find very distressing sad traumatic and they just want to be on equal footing yeah so it's like how do we host that conversation and i'm motivated by that i don't know exactly how to do it but i want to do that yeah do you find your less people stare at you less in new york city um because everyone looks crazy in new york city you don't even have the time to register whether people are staring at you at new york city because there's so many people yeah yeah right whereas by meaning coffee shops and things like that it feels like people wear all sorts of crazy outfits in new york city yeah but to your point i actually went into a coffee shop in new york city and the barista behind the counter i suppose was a bloke who identified as a woman and had a very kind of effeminate sort of lisp or something um but yeah i i think i i was i was i really wanted him to know that i was glad he existed like i saw the same thing with my wife like because he got super angry at someone who just left and i don't know if it's i don't think the guy did anything i think this guy was just super sensitive and a hurt kind of person but it was just yeah i really wanted to be like how are you like tell me about your day but that's a it's a really lovely and sympathetic and dare we use a word that's been co-opted but yet still mean something empathetic way to kind of encounter someone yeah you want to know how they feel and you don't want them to feel like a freak yeah we talked about this before too just in basic human interaction you don't want to go straight into problem solving mode so if your wife says like bad day kid's crazy car broke down feel like jumping out of a third story window you're not like uh hey do you want me to board up the window you know you want me to grab the car you want me to she doesn't want you to go straight into troubleshooting so much as she wants to hear to say uh i'm sorry you know like tell me about that you know like people yeah want their experience validated and that's not condescending it's not like i'm going to validate your experience so that we can move on to the next step that i actually care about it's like boarding up that window exactly so this is another human being and until such time as you make a human connection what happens afterwards like what happens next doesn't matter too much it's like i'm not thinking about that yet i'm just thinking i haven't seen you in a while except on zoom right around face time yeah and it's just like you know here we are in a living person it's like wow another human being i'm having a human interaction this is great you know like let's start there yeah and maybe just in a basic way i think that that's that's part of what's missing in the conversation like things we talked about earlier with how one worships you know in the novus order or the traditional latin mass or navigating conversations about things that have been politicized i think that you know even just even just saying it in these simple terms a lot of people will be like you know weak willed you know totally blah blah blah beige nonsense it's like okay whatever you know fine um but but ultimately you have to be able to meet somebody at a at on common ground and i think that the most basic common ground is our common humanity speaking of habits why uh what is the best religious habit and why is it the benedictine one you asked me about the best religious habit i know it first i just thought it would be funny to phrase it that way i don't really need you to answer all right next question uh but i had father boniface hicks in the studio dude that that benedictine habit is so cool yeah it's cool because it kind of looks like like a legit monk like when you think of monk it might also be his five foot long beard but but yeah it's neat yeah good good yeah i mean their their habits are a thousand times more practical because they actually conceal stains so for instance i can tell you right now i am wearing what am i wearing soup sorry i mean this thing is coming to pieces i'm wearing three cigars that i smoked you know a couple nights ago that i haven't watched it since then i am wearing some of the metro escalator right now i sat in sap maybe on thursday so i have like eight little sap things and i already went at them with some goo gone but they're still there and i'm just despairing of them ever leaving my habit how many hours do you have two but i only packed this one and i'm traveling for 16 days so there you go but um yeah so but their habit none of those things pose real problems they're killing it they won the practical game it's so cool and not not only is it practical in that it's black and hides things it just looks cool like i feel like if father boniface would have walked into a coffee shop they wouldn't know they would they might think he was an eastern monk they might think you know he was buddhist or something they wouldn't whereas i think yours is just all together unusual and not in a cool like i think it's cool because i'm a catholic and i associate it with thomas aquinas yeah also though it looks like gandalf yeah i don't think you look like gandalf well i only use wizard in highly joking context and people like what are you i'm like wizard they're like moving on um so yeah i it's one of those things where i when i first saw dominicans i was struck by the habit but i had already fallen in love with st thomas aquinas in the sense that i had heard him talked about and that i read about him and i loved him and then when i saw dominicans i was recognizing i wasn't uh discovering yeah and then i saw certain things about the dominican habit and i was like that's weird so white habit white socks yeah exactly and then i got on the inside it's like well this may as well happen you know you just kind of concede but you're on vacation right now with a with a brother dominican and you're all aware in the habit i mean is it is it part of you were you just like let's just make a pact can we just go in shorts and it's a vacation i'm just tired of people looking at me does that ever happen yeah i haven't done that what was the decision was there a decision to both wear the habit because i mean i saw you this morning you're having coffee you're vacationing yeah yeah was there a decision that we're both gonna wear the habit or that's just what happens i think that's just what happens yeah so you know there's no there's no law as to you have to wear the habit in this setting you don't have to wear the habit in this setting i mean you just if you're at your house you'd wear your habit to most things i don't know i mean there's no real strict delineation as to point by point but i think you just kind of get in the custom you get in the habit of wearing the habit and i think that's part of the deal for me it's like a lot of people will talk about in terms of penance or they'll talk about it in terms of witness testimony evangelization i think about it most fundamentally in terms of identity just when i'm when i'm you know getting ready to go to bed it's like i just here we go taking off my habit it's like a i'm hopping in bed you know it's just kind of like you just how do i express i don't know exactly like you're associating the removal of the habit for nap time what no no i'm just thinking in terms of like the most fundamental thing about it is identity so if you know maybe it's not the best thing but if i were to be out and so like i'm going hiking or something like that and if i were to see somebody mid-trail whom i knew i think my first reaction would be like so i'm not wearing my habit in this context my first reaction would be like hey you know i'd be like like you caught me with my shirt exactly yeah yeah it's like ah you know yeah so i don't know i don't know how to describe it in a way that's actually helpful i i um the dominicans are you all kind of exploding right now like with vocations or say if you were to look at the last five years is there some momentum here yeah so that's what i'm picking up on i think it's because it binds with aquinas that's gotta be it yeah yeah yeah certainly pints of aquinas would be the number one they should where do we drink that's not what we do damn it matt frat no i think a lot of i mean a lot of people have come to the knowledge of saint thomas come to the knowledge of the dominican order through this which is awesome but um no i think that i think you've seen for maybe the past 15 years folks checking into the i i'm a son of the eastern province province of st joseph and i don't know as much about the other provinces so i can't really speak to that but um yeah i think there's a desire for the intellectual life for a preaching apostolate for uh something that's contemplative right so i think that a lot of the features which are present in the dominican life are attractive to people and um that's not to say that like everyone is a perfect fit and so far as i don't know that anyone is a perfect fit for anything but i think that given the state of the church in the 21st century given the state of religious life in the united states a lot of people are like i think this is it so yeah which isn't a grounds for self-congratulations because it's like what do we do nothing next point you know i think it's just a kind of peculiar expression of the mercy of god i think i'd be like the idea of running a parish would be enough to drive me into religious life where i don't have to do that i mean a lot of religious do run parishes so oh okay well yeah i might just get married then there you go nailed it all right why don't we take a break and then when we come back i want to look at an article from the summer in which thomas aquinas talks about how to what do you say better better memorizing things yeah growing memory he has real practical suggestions on how to be better at memorizing things so that's what we're going to do we're going to do that and then we're going to take some questions from our patrons so all right cool all right i want to say thank you to two of our sponsors the first being homeschool connections if you are a parent who is homeschooling or who is considering homeschooling you need to check out homeschoolconnections.com matt there is a link in the description below this is an amazing program uh it is 100 catholics so all of the teachers are faithful to the magisterium of the church and the teachers are really sensational imagine your kid being taught apologetics by trent horn from catholic answers or tim staples from catholic answers or being taught literature by people like joseph pearce it's really great they have live and interactive courses that meet in real time they also have recorded independent learning courses that can be taken on your schedule also the prices are really good so you can continue to do homeschooling on a budget homeschoolconnections.com again link in the description below please check these guys out and make sure you go to homeschoolconnections.com so that they know that we sent you yeah they have a parent community for meaningful connections to other parents just like you so it's not just something you show to your children it's something that you as a parent are engaging in as well homeschool connections i also want to say thank you to hello hello is a really amazing app that will help you to pray and to meditate i've been advertising these guys for a few years now and they just keep getting better and better and better i actually downloaded the app the other day because i got a new phone so it was off my phone and i bought the year subscription and i've been really loving it it leads you through rosary meditations or lectio divinas or night exams it even has sleep stories from people like jonathan rooney from the chosen or father mike schmitz or yes myself but whatever you don't listen to that one um it's really really excellent and i'd encourage you to go check it out hello.com mattfradd and when you sign up there at hello.comfred you'll get a month free to everything on the app now you can just download the app and you'll get free you know free certain certain things will be free but not all of it but if you want access to the entire app so you can just try it out and see if you want to you know use this to pray with hello dot com slash matt frat that's h-a-l-l-o-w dot com slash matt fradd they are the number one app on itunes as far as catholic apps are concerned you know there's a lot of these apps that help you to meditate and things like this but they're new agey you know or they they just teach false things or they just lead you into that kind of way of thinking this isn't like that 100 catholic really well produced hello dot com slash matt fradd hello.com mattfradd and then finally i would just like to ask you if you would consider supporting us at pints with aquinas.com give you can give directly or you can you know go to patreon and give there we're trying to raise money for a full-time video guy we're also trying to launch our pints with aquinas espanol channel which will be called tequila con aquino so if you're enjoying this work and you want to throw us a few bucks every month that really adds up and we really appreciate it alright back to the interview in five seconds yep we're going perfect i love it uh hello and welcome back i am not matt fratt i'm father gregory pine but you already knew that on account of the fact that you had tuned in to the first half of this year episode so i suppose we've covered some ground at this point but rather than recapitulate it because you already watched it and don't need a recapitulation i can just describe something new and distinct in the absence of the actual host of the show so what are things that i'm thinking about i just finished a chapter of my dissertation on instrumental causality and one of the things that i think that is cool is this namely that when you ordinarily use an instrument the kind of main cause just kind of works through the instrument but in such a way that the instrument itself isn't changed so somebody who uh builds a bed uses an axe there we go uses an axe but it doesn't change the acts just uses the axe to make a bed whereas oh wow i got another bottle of water in the case of our lord jesus christ his being the instrument of the godhead makes it so that his humanity has actually changed you're like okay this doesn't make sense to me but maybe if he explains it further it'll begin to so carpenter picks up axe uses acts to make bed bed is made axe is discarded axe is really unchanged by the encounter whereas godhead takes up the human nature uses the human nature to save humanity but the human nature is so full of grace with a quasi-infinite grace that it itself as instrument is changed there's so many things going on right now so i think that the way in which our lord interacts with his own human nature right interacts is probably a bad verb to describe it but it's indicative of the type of change that can be wrought in our own humanity the lord doesn't want to just pick us up like a like a saw and make a bed with us as if the lord were a kind of divine carpenter yeah head scratch all right he wants to transfigure our humanity in such a way that it's actually divinized such that we become like god and so i've been thinking about this and writing about this and as a result of which it's been cropping up in a lot of my preaching and it's awesome so that is my thought to share that's such a deep thought for just for me to pour my espresso i was like just go in and say something my bad no it's fantastic i just missed the beginning so hey why don't you crack that open so you don't die of heat stroke cracked open do we need this you can crack it even more i think that camera's on me right we're good yeah so look at that look at that all that long oh yeah smokes we're killing it all right so before we get to questions from our patrons we're going to take a look at what aquinas has to say am i am i in the right place uh no you started flipping at some point but we're about to be good thing you know exactly where it is um according to my calculations if i flip one more page i will happen upon the article all right so this article whether memory is part of prudence we can even just read the second sort of reply since that's primarily what we're interested in i think yeah can i do a little background yeah so saint thomas in the treatise on prudence which goes from secunda secunde question 47 to sukuniku sukunde question 46 he first describes prudence in say and then he devotes a question to the different kinds of parts of prudence so we've talked before about subjective parts about integral parts and about quasi potential parts so an example of quasi-potential part would be like something that looks a lot like the virtue but doesn't wholly share in the perfection of the virtue so like justice for instance is a virtue religion is a quasi-potential part because it's justice towards god but in the case of justice towards god you can't be holy and entirely relieved of your debt because you're always going to be in his debt look over here yeah um sorry so uh and then with subjective parts that'd be like species of the virtue so like in the case of prudence you've got monastic prudence which is prudence for oneself you've got economic prudence which is prudence for your household you've got military prudence that makes sense you've got regulative prudence etc so there's different species of prudence depending on the setting and then integral parts when st thomas describes it he says it's like the foundation the walls and the roof of a house so it's the things that taken together go up to make the virtue so he describes eight integral parts of prudence memory docility understanding reason yeah providence um caution and circumspection i think that was it maybe i forgot one but it doesn't matter too terribly much oh shrewdness that's the one i forgot and each of those goes towards building up prudence in its integrity so when he's talking about memory he's talking specifically about our experience of the past because when we're seeking to be prudent right to be prudent prudence to exhibit or to events right reason and things to be done you need to have a good sense of what's gone before yeah because if you're like try try again and eventually things will magically change that's you that's because you're dumb so like bringing up uh the papacy to your protestant family over thanksgiving after you've said past the gravy you should remember that that didn't go well last time exactly yeah so so he's talking about the fact that being prudent right being reasonable in your daily affairs uh whether ordinary or extraordinary requires that you have a good sense of what has gone on before so there's there's a real value to memory and he's talking about it in that way okay cool so the reason we want to well i'm interested in this especially is because oh come on don't say i flipped again which article i think you're good so i think it was a second article right so it's there are four things whereby a man perfects his memory and so here he gives us where were we um first when a man wishes to remember a thing he should take some suitable yet somewhat unwanted illustration of it since the unwanted strikes us more and so makes a greater and stronger impression on the mind and this explains why we remember better what we saw when we were children that's really cool now the reason for the necessity of finding these illustrations or images is that simple and spiritual impressions easily slip from the mind unless they be tied as it were to some corporeal image because human knowledge has a greater hold on sensible objects for this reason memory is assigned to the sensitive part of the soul all right break that down because that's fantastic yeah so when saint thomas talks about memory often when he describes it he means it first in the sense of sense memory so you got the five external senses which everyone knows and then you've got the four internal senses the common sense coordinates your sense experience and then the imagination furnishes these phantasms right so it takes that collated image and it presents it as it were to the intellect this is real rough and ready and if there's like 700 epistemologists watching right now they're like uh-huh i find this to be very imprecise um and then those sense images those phantasms are stored in the sense memory and st thomas will say that when we return to a thought about something after having cognized it right after having abstracted i'll say that we often return well we do always return to the phantasm so we need to appeal back to the senses in order to recall even intellectual knowledge because that's how our minds work and then the fourth of the internal senses he calls the estimative power the cogitative power which is like a kind of animal member excuse me kind of animal reason so for him he's very insistent about this connection between sense and intellect and that the way to the intellect is through the senses and you can't get over under around or behind that it's just how human intellection works it's what's distinctive of us as discursive embodied etc so when it comes to retaining a memory for something like laying hold of some intellectual insight and having kind of perfect recall of that thing or being able to appeal to it at the desired time it's got to be associated in some ironclad way with with your senses so you can think about simple sense images and we were talking about this earlier they say a good technique for remembering where you laid your keys down is to as you lay your keys down picture them exploding and then you're more likely to remember their setting i think also when we use mnemonics for instance i have an easier time remembering mnemonics that are silly yes so i can tell you like 10th grade chemistry mr seidel taught us the first twenty uh elements in the periodic table h he lead off nina mcgowan sips clark a car let's go same thing yeah exactly really um so because it sounds funny it just sounds silly and once you got and then the diatomic particles you taught us another one for that it's like huncle breath right the different things that they only appear in a free state when they're paired and i just remember those because when he did huncle breath he would sneeze he'd be like huncle breath you know and that's that's hilarious yeah right so i have this association iron-clad association between the sense experience and then the intellectual retention mm-hmm and so saint thomas is saying that if you're going to be prudent you're going to have to have recall over past experiences of things so like for instance when you overeat right you can you can at the time remember acutely what it felt like to be overstuffed uncomfortable unable to sleep filled with regret the next morning but the question is next time you're tempted to do such like thing yeah will you recall that yeah and i think that there it's helpful to like have a a handle for that experience maybe the last time you over ate it was on those cheetos which are really really hot and not only did you ate way too much of them but also your mouth was scorched and they got all over your habit exactly yeah yeah yeah exactly and then your wife asked you if you had you know been in to the pantry and like no and she's like i have your fingerprints here in cheeto dust you know so you associate with all these bad things um so you you it might be helpful to return at times to the cheeto experience or to refer to it as like the cheeto catastrophe just to have some way by which to have a handle and then when you when you next have the opportunity to overeat you're like wow look at these rich and sumptuous foods you're like i feel like i'm staging a 15th century renaissance fair um just just like you'll have the cheeto experience as a as a kind of handle in the past on which to hold so that you can retain some modicum of control you're like i want to not hate myself tomorrow and there was the cheeto experience right so i think that it's it's things like that that he's appealing to yeah yeah what does unwanted mean like umw and see that's very interesting because he's not just saying think of something outlandish he's saying think of something that is undesirable like under or maybe it's is it w-o-n-t-e-d yes maybe that's just out of the ordinary yeah that's what i might yeah as i was wanting to do as i was ordinarily to do yeah maybe that's what it is out of the ordinary that's what that means okay yeah i know i do this all the time but it's escaping me right now yeah which which ones have no i think that it's it's just easy to forget in the sense that we constantly tell ourselves it'll be different this time but if it is going to be different this time you have to have a reason for which and it can't be like occult appeal to body chemistry it's like i probably had a bad reaction you know the last two times because of something else that i ate earlier it's like no i think it's just i think it's just when you sit down to eat a bowl full of cheetos you lose your mind like i'm this way with chex muddy buddies for instance okay um they're incredible right but for me it's a two-step process reach hand in a chex muddy buddy bowl and then step two is wake up covered in powdered sugar right so so because i don't have that intermediate experience right because i've just blacked out in like a fit of consumption i need to recall both the beginning and the end and appeal to that when i'm next thinking about eating an incredible amount of chex muddy buddies this doesn't just apply to like moral actions it applies to like things we actually want to store in our memory like thinking of ecumenical councils in order for example or the seven sacrament work yeah there's there's a mnemonic for that too go and do it do you know what uh the question is do i remember it um where's the handle where's the hair where is it it's nico nico la la la la lulu vico flo la trivava let's go let's go so do the first like syllable yeah so it's just the first syllable of each city no but say the say the first part of that oh nico fcal yeah all right now tell us what those are nice yeah constantinople ephesus calcitin amazing yeah coco nico constantinople ii constantinople 3 nicea 2 constantinople 4. lala lala later in 1 2 3 4. lulu v co leon 1 and 2 v n constance flola florence later in five trivava trent vatican one vatican okay now one more time for those at home who really want to go like gonna get like 10 seconds behind and keep listening to this say that one more time nico f cal coco nico i'm wondering about those who are just now tuning into the live stream they're drunk i mean they're actually drunk drunk on espresso yeah yeah yeah um okay but back to that yeah specifically to it doesn't seem to be a purely moral thing saint thomas doesn't understand prudence as a moral virtue in the way that we think of prudence as a moral virtue okay because and we were talking about this earlier we have a way of subdividing our lives so there are things that you do and then there are moral things that you do yeah yeah where's human acts and moral acts are synonymous with thomas yeah so for st thomas and for aristotle it's just about being a good happy human being and for instance like you read the nicomachean ethics and you're talking about you know all kinds of things that seem immediately pertinent to the moral life like prudence and justice and fortitude but they're of a piece with like wittiness for instance and friendship and contemplation so for aristotle to live ethically means to be a good human being and it's not like okay so a good test of this is do i want to hang out with this guy right that's a good test of whether somebody is a good human being or whether somebody is moral in the more robust sense that aristotle and st thomas would say because you might say you know he's very prudent he's very just he's very for you know like courageous he's very temperate but um he just can't you know just can't conduct a conversation he just turns every conversation into a q a session or he just turns every conversation into a listening of baseball statistics well that's because he's boorish which is a vice kind of on par with intemporous like cowardice ingest etc because the point isn't to be you know just a moral human being and then if you have all these other defects of character then you know whatever it's not that big a deal because they're not moral it's like no the point is to be a good human being the moral life embraces all of what it means to be a human being and everything is moral the moral life is just shot through all human activity and so when it comes to being prudent it turns out it's you don't just memorize things so that you have nice moral tropes to which you can appeal when making a moral decision it's good to remember your life so that you can conduct your life in the present in accord with what you have learned from it and that just that's that's a matter of when it's a big moral decision you know do i steal or do i not and when it's a seemingly non-moral decision in our contemporary understanding of the matter like should i tell this joke or something you know it's whatever yeah so memory just matters because it's part of a good human life because it contributes to the flourishing of prudence which contributes to the flourishing of the human being yeah yeah um there is i forget his name now he's written several books on the memory and incorporating thomas aquinas and one thing he'll do is he'll have you like imagine walking through a room and seeing particular things and then kind of placing memories there yeah like so for example what are the three what are the first three of the ten commandments i am the lord your god you should have known with god's before me you shall not take the name of the lord your god in vain holding the sabbath keep holding the sabbath and then honor your mother and father right so what he does is he's like okay imagine you um you walk up to a door and you open the door and you hear a loud crash and the next thing that happens is you look down and the mat is is cursing and saying all sorts of awful things with its big lips coming out of the mat and you walk into the room and then you look out of the left window pane and see a beautiful sun and a lovely sunny day and then on the right side of the door is a portrait of your mother and father you know and it's you you make your way through this building this is so easy then because it's like okay the loud crash represents the destruction of the idols as we worship the one true god the mat obviously representing blasphemy and things like that and the sun representing uh the sabbath and right is this kevin foster yeah memorizing yeah yeah i'd really if people like this thing that we're talking about right now and want to kind of get better at memorizing things i would highly recommend him because like a mat with lips talking to you that's hard to forget you know you don't move on from that okay here's the second thing he says secondly whatever a man wishes to retain in his memory he must carefully consider and set in order so that he may pass ah here we go this is exactly what i just talked about so that he may pass easily from them one memory to another hence the philosopher says sometimes a place brings memories back to us the reason being that we pass quickly from the one to the other yeah and this so there are a lot of things you could say about that but i think the kind of foundational principle is that it pertains to the wise to order and you're more likely to retain or to remember those things that you've placed in orderly fashion so like the idea of a memory palace is just one way by which to order but you can also articulate arguments in the sense that like you recognize that this depends upon this depends upon this and as a result you can recall that whole chain of argumentation rather than just having a bunch of facts scattered about and i think that's one of the reasons in part where you find aquinas resonating with people nowadays because i think when we first come to the knowledge of the faith it feels eclectic to us because the catechism for instance is a beautiful document and it represents the faith in a way that's very compelling but it's also trying to give you the church's tradition without tipping its hat as to lowercase t traditions it's not like this is the faith as aquinas taught it it's like this is the faith as taught by the church the scriptures the church fathers the tradition medieval theologians saints there's the sense that there are all of these different ways by which the church's life is mediated to us and it wants to give you a uh a sneak peek into all of them at the very least or a kind of indication of them but sometimes it'll feel eclectic because saints resolution doesn't necessarily express the faith in the same way that saint john damascene does so you're kind of picking things up but but then how do you put them together and when you read st thomas aquinas you'll often see how it all is to be put together because saint thomas reads all these people who came before him like st john damascene for instance and then he's able to incorporate them in arguments so once you've learned some principles from saint thomas you feel like you're able to argue your way through the faith and that gives you a confidence that this thing is intelligible it's coherent it can be communicated it can be learned by those to whom i testify um so when it comes to memorization there's a sense that that order is very important and association is very important for memorization yeah yeah i wrote an article once on what i call the apologetics mansion where the base was the theistic apologetics the second was christian apologetics the final was catholic apologetics and my suggestion was it helps when somebody's pressing you on a particular topic to wonder where in the mansion are we because someone might say i don't believe in god because the bible's filled with all sorts of fantastical false things and you're like okay so you're not in the first level because of something you should accept on the second or third level like okay maybe the bible's false that wouldn't show the you shouldn't be the first level cool yeah i again i i think i think i might get that book again by kevin voss because i remember that being really really helpful he goes through the beatitudes he goes through the ten commandments he goes through i think uh even the councils not the way you did although that was more fun thirdly says aquinas we must be anxious and earnest about the things we wish to remember because the more a thing is impressed on the mind the less it is liable to slip out of it wherefore tully says in his rhetoric that anxiety preserves the figures of images entire what does he remember that um i don't know exactly what the word anxiety is there i can't imagine that it's like anxiety what would it be like solicitude i imagine is probably what he's describing so for him it's a kind of exercise of volition in a particular direction so if you're going to retain memories you're going to have to want to retain memories so you're not just going to be able to say here i am in my barca lounger recline with my dog in my feet my beer and my ponch and my television whatever lighting up whatever image before me and i'll i'll lay claim to it i'll hold it because it's a human activity and so it it demands of you that you continue to rehearse it yes so for instance reading books is not enough reading books is not enough and i think that this is important so i think a lot of people want to have read the books but they don't necessarily want to have assimilated the things that the books propose so you've got a list maybe found a list online of the 100 most excellent books of all time and you want to read them all there is no gold stars awarded for speed there are no gold stars awarded for completionism you get something i suppose from having read it but if it's worth your time it's worth reading once it's worth reading twice it's worth outlining it's worth trying to teach to another human being so for instance i remember those things which i have read multiple times i have outlined and that i've had to communicate and like sometimes you know like if i'm i'm kind of stuck up against something in prayer and i feel like i'm drifting or i feel like i'm tired i'll just try to preach it out to the lord and i'm like i know you don't care you know this already but this is my way by which to rehearse the insight and i hope that it might be deepened as a result so i think that there's the sense that memory is not just a passive receptacle it's an expression of human agency so when it comes to reading books we're not just trying to dominate the intelligible universe by checking things off a list we're trying to exercise our mind in such a way that the the use of our intellect is perfected right so the content is important but also the use of the intellect is important because yeah i mean we're we're called to the perfection of knowing and loving in act right not just as passive repository of content yeah that's a thought yeah all right that's good yeah this remembers this reminds me of when i was um here's another mnemonic device i remember one of the first bible verses i remember was john 10 10 where christ says a thief comes only to steal kill and destroy i have come you may have life and life to the full you're like well 10 out of 10 it's like a full life like there's an easy way to remember it um but yeah i remember like spending some time doing that for a while i had kind of amassed a number of scripture verses that i memorized and somebody said how do you do that and that's i was like you have to try like have you tried well no well then yeah well you weren't be able to do it uh companion thought the what do you call that oh man if you can't remember the name of the prayer that doesn't go ahead and prove anything about memory um the angel lord declared unto mary the angelus yeah so i am not especially good with the order of things call and response blah blah blah but a good mnemonic for that is a-a-b-b-a-a okay so the angel of the lord declared unto mary and she conceived by the holy spirit hail mary et cetera yeah behold the handmaid of the lord be it done unto me according to thy word hail mary et cetera and the word became flesh and dwelt on augustus simple things are helpful like that but i'll i'll lead that prayer you know depending on which content i'm living in or depending on whether i'm preaching retreat blah blah it doesn't matter but i'll lead that with some frequency and i still appeal to that so that pneumonic is made helpful in so far as it's continually exercised so yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah well another one is i this is back in the day like romans 3 23 that talks about all of sin and fallen short of the glory of god i thought i've 23 michael jordan best basketball player and i don't know how that kind of maybe it's like none of us are as good as him or something like that but the point is i guess not even just to try to adopt other people's mnemonic devices or unwanted images but to like come up with something that's super strange and somehow it does stick like that like this i wouldn't have remembered romans 3 23 being that unless i had a you know had coming up with your own come up with your own i gotta learn how to speak unwanted okay fourthly we should often reflect on the things have we done this no we wish to remember yes no we haven't yet hence the philosopher says that reflections preserve memories because as he remarks custom is a second nature wherefore when we reflect on a thing frequently we quickly call it to mind through passing from one thing to another by a kind of natural order recollection you can also think about that so again this shows where it's not just a matter of prudence as a moral virtue for doing moral things by comparison to other things which are not moral nor is it just memory exercises so you can show off as to how much of the faith you've memorized but this is this has application in prayer so when you think about our lives before the lord are the lives of a forgetful people um when you think about it in terms of covenant fidelity we read in i think it's one of the letters of saint paul that though you be faithless yet i remain faithful for i cannot deny myself so god remembers right at the middle of that story of noah people talk about a chiastic structure where the first resembles the last and so too the second resembles the second to last and it kind of comes to this point where it's and god remembered noah so god remembers his people he recalls his people and you could talk a lot about anamnesis and what it means to recall it doesn't necessarily entail forgetting but god god brings his people to the front of his mind to speak somewhat metaphorically and part of i mean a very significant part of christian life or maybe the way in which you could describe christian life in its entirety is bringing the lord to the front of your mind as we're calling the lord and so when we talk about prayer as we did at the top of the hour prayer is sometimes described after the manner of recollection right so you want to be continually in the presence of god how do you do that it's by recovering this godward gaze it's by having god always before your mind's eye why because you're afraid if you don't that you'll lapse into huge sin no but because this is what it means to be in the presence of the beloved this is what it means to be caught up in covenant fidelity right to think longingly on you know he whom my heart loves and so memory is part of every aspect of human life and if that's so then it's present at the summit of human life and our relationship with god and so being prudent uh memorizing things prayer they're all not so much distinct facets of a human reality as they are kind of distinct expressions so the exercise of the intellect which intellect as made to the image of god has a has a kind of upward trajectory which comes to its perfection in prayer and worship and you and i were speaking before we went on air today about how we often kind of offload memory onto our spouse or our friends or those we live with and how today it's like we offload stuff onto google and and i've thought about i i i'm beginning to find myself a little disappointed when people quickly like what's the name of that song oh and they pull out their phone and i haven't realized why that's been disappointing me a lot of things disappoint me um but but but yeah why is that a problem and how does that negatively impact our memory yeah so i i mean just at the level of a gut reaction i don't like it when people pull out their cell phones to settle trivial disputes in conversation because i think one of the delightful aspects of conversation is just making stuff up no okay not not in the sense of like making up false answers but like a free space of speculation because it's very fun and because of the type of exercises that it entails so it's like who won the nba championship in 2014. how was it yeah yeah it's like yeah that's kind of at the end of the golden years for the celtics you know garnett had come over from the t wolves and they had rondo at that point and paul pierce was still a good basketball player and but i think that their star had kind of begun to descend and who was coming up at that time i mean the spurs they they won four over the course of 20 years i think that was tim don't was 2000 was kawhi was it you know danny i think you know because then you just rehearsed your knowledge of the basketball universe over the course of a decade and you've been kind of reawakened as to the things that you did in you know at the end of college at the beginning of religious life i didn't watch basketball and religious life at the beginning because i didn't know what was going on i came back into my inheritance as it were later but like you have those kinds of conversations which are meaningful humor and human encounters because the part of the the point of a human encounter isn't to settle you know trivial questions so that you can be like yes it was the spurs it's like who who cares yeah right it's like moving on but to what because the thing that we could have done once we can settle by google yeah exactly yeah yeah the thing that we could have done would have been delightful yes and i think you just miss out on a lot of the delight of ordinary human interaction by settling um by appealing and also i mean just just as soon as a phone is on the table or just as soon as a phone is brought out the quality of the conversation just decreases and i think everyone experiences this i'm a little tired of us complaining about all the negative things the phones do to us without us taking manful decisions to get rid of them yeah because it feels like more and more we're all kind of realizing this but we're not doing anything powerful about it yeah yeah yeah we talked about this when you came on godsplaining uh the idea that a phone i thought about that a lot what you said a phone is for my convenience but it interacts with other phones which are for other person's convenience and so you find yourself at a kind of convenience crossroads yes and that when you take a violent decision for your own sanity it does inconvenience others and others don't necessarily have the wherewithal to process that in a way except as like you know um this just happened today sister miriam texted me a friend of mine and i wrote back to her and i'm like so thank you so much for checking in i'm so glad you did i'm gonna be taking august off of the internet i won't have my phone i would have hate for you to reach out but there's that like initial like fear first few days of august like people are gonna be texting me and i won't be texting them back and they haven't watched this episode or they don't know that i'm giving it up and they're going to be offended yeah so every time i go from switzerland to united states i switch my sim card and it's not like i send out a group text you know on the swiss number yeah it's like people will continue to text the last number and then they'll be somewhat confused for a couple days and then they might remember oh yeah i'll bop over to the other number or they might not and that's that you know because if i send out a big text to everyone that says hey then i'm not going to get any work done in my dissertation for three days because i'll just be like finishing up a bunch of text conversations with the life of people who are wonderful to communicate with and i'm not posing that as like an obstacle in life it's just it's not why i'm there which is tough to communicate without making it sound overly severe but you know it's just it's just what it is so i don't want people to think that i'm not i don't care for you but i also don't want to be available in a way motivated by an anxiety to express that care so how do you thread that needle that's the question yeah i think it looks different every s i mean you do august i do sim card switch i also don't respond to text messages in certain like circumstances so it's like i don't want to have a text string yeah i often don't yeah especially if somebody's not even asking me a question like hey went to the beach today cool don't care like i care a little bit but if i say awesome what was it like now i'm committed to yet another thread of yeah so initial thoughts are i think that we could do with more silencing of cell phones and it doesn't have to be from this time to this time but i think that it can just kind of be intermittent so i went to mass i silenced my cell phone i forgot to turn like unsilence it a couple hours later because if there's something urgent that'd come up either it will or it won't this is this frustrates my wife to know when yeah i not only have a full inbox people like your inbox is full like i know that if it wasn't you could leave a message and then i'd have to get back to you but i also leave it on do not disturb all day long all day long so people have to text and i don't even hear it vibrate and then i check it my wife's just like would you please take it off and that's fair but i won't no you just give you say okay this phone is for other people for you we have walkie-talkies yeah yeah and then also people have i think differing degrees of being able to cope with this amount of information coming in also certain people just get a lot more text messages and emails than other people yeah that's true and i think that's probably true of me like i think i do probably get a lot more emails and random direct messages from people than some other people and then i cannot imagine being someone like scott hahn like that guy must be bombarded all day long although he's probably not on social media but or if he is someone that's running it yeah yeah yeah no i think i mean it's kind of tone setting too there are different ways in which to be available to people i was thinking about this this past weekend because of this retreat so right internet ministry you talk to people in a certain way on the internet but you don't necessarily have a relationship with them if you do have a relationship with them it's kind of a relationship of goodwill or of you know interest of a certain sort but it's not of benevolence in the kind of thick way that you would see it describe aristotle st thomas and then here we are all together there's five of us friars there's maybe 70 people on the retreat 70-71 and there were just so many golden moments we were sitting out on saturday night i was at a table with eight nine ten people from all over the place and we're smoking cigars and drinking beers and just talking about the good life and it was like yes this is exactly how this is exactly the trajectory that the podcast ought to take it's like two human communion indeed right in a way that was really seamless and natural and it was cool because you know we had a shuttle from laguardia that took folks to um that took folks to like to the retreat center so they didn't have to navigate long island on their own and just from the moment that they got on the bus everyone was talking to everyone else because they knew that they had a kind of common ground and that's what it ought to provide a common ground for genuine communion and you know you find this or you well that was my experience of the pints of aquinas retreat last year it's like these people are so cool yeah and i didn't know them and now i do and it yeah but it is also weird like you'd have that experience people listen to god's explaining so they feel that they know you so when they see you like ah and you're like who are you you know yeah but like most people are just cool about it you know they're like hey i appreciate the podcast that's why i'm here yeah very grateful for it and then it's like so what's up you know so you just kind of get over that in seven seconds yeah indeed yeah yeah and then you're just on to normal life and i just met a handful of people by whom i was like yo these people are awesome yeah and i was kind of impressed i i frequently have that experience um of meeting somebody and then realizing i think to myself yesterday i didn't know you existed and now that i know you do the world is better to me you know like i often have that like i'll encounter these incredible faithful priests with these amazing families like wow like yesterday i had a view of the world and where we were headed and what it was like and if i could have inserted you into it i it would have made it better and lo and behold you do in fact exist and yay not for sure i mean yeah it's it's always surprising but surprising in a way that kind of keeps our cynicism or our sarcasm at bay like a lot of times i think we tend to just be a little bit dismissive of reality we feel as if we've seen enough of it to know that it's just not that good and then it keeps crashing in on us in such a way that we have to be open to the prospect that there are other people out there doing not just doing but being wonderful you know not just doing wonderful things but being wonderful people and that that broadens our horizons or opens up our experience in such a way like we can't say you know i'm going to close the door on this somebody it's just it just keeps being good just keeps being beautiful so well let's take a few questions here from our patrons do it thanks for being a patron patron yeah catholic jamie should be arriving first of september catholic and jamie so joe rogan who you don't know because you're cooler than me has a podcast he has a guy who runs his cameras and computers and and we have john paul who's graciously doing it right now but we have a full-time person moving in to steubenville okay yeah that's so that's gonna be great for this for for pints it was just like a big investment yeah so i said to everybody please become a patron immediately and a lot of people have stepped up and so are going to be able to afford it ben hutchinson says father pine i am of the opinion that the problem of divine hiddenness is the best argument for atheism do you have any books or articles recommendations on this topic yeah i recommend a book or excuse me an article by travis dumsday in the american catholic philosophical quarterly called i think it's just called the problem of divine hiddenness i actually just wrote an essay for a ward on fire collected edition um i don't know the title of it but it's going to come out soonish about divine hiddenness so yeah i can send you that essay slash check out travis dumbsday because mine is just um i don't know what you would call it but it's a it's a theological extension of a philosophical argument that he gives uh and also ben we've done a whole episode on divine hiddenness you could go to pineswithaquinas.com click on episodes and search that very topic if you're interested boom uh paul benner says is it better to have a valid although illicit mass or no mass at all where do you draw the line we have an assistant pastor that takes great liberties with the structure of the mass but the consecration seems to be valid i've discussed this with him and the main pastor he feels he's okay doing this to make things more understandable for the congregation the main pastor doesn't feel he'll be able to change this pastor and he doesn't want to lose the help so the main question again is it better to have a valid although illicit mass or no mass at all valid but illicit jax and sorry yeah yeah doesn't mean it's not i once went to confession because i just stood up in the middle of a homily and left sunday mass with my kids and i can't do it can't do it it's weird stop playing guitars that homily was awful and probably heretical and then i went to confession and it was like a sorry not sorry but kind of sorry if i have to be you tell me one of those things i uh i was talking to a a fellow friend of mine priest friend opus deigo and i was complaining about the level of liturgies in my area and he was he started saying yeah like yeah this isn't fair and yeah matt and i don't know what this accent is but he eventually said like ma matt fradd doesn't deserve a good liturgy matt frat deserves hell i'm like whoa all right good let's keep going it's so good yeah his point isn't we should just have a sloppy liturgy but the point was let's keep things in perspective help me jack skian says this is a question that i've been trying to think through for a while and i'd love father pine's insights is the blood of jesus christ redemptive in and of itself or does redemption come from christ's self-sacrifice in other words is jesus accidentally skinned sorry if jesus accidentally skinned his knees as a child would the blood that he shed be redemptive in any way what a question yeah and i know you're ready i am ready so it's it's efficacious in virtute divina so in or by virtue of the divine power and so the lord jesus christ's body blood as it were is made efficacious for the attainment of salvation by virtue of the fact that it is conjoined to the godhead and that the the godhead has associated it in the work of salvation as an instrument so that's true of christ's human nature in its entirety so that's true of his soul and body that's true of his intellect will passions the defects that he assumes uh kind of in solidarity with sinful humanity that's true of all that kind of goes to constitute his human nature so the lord performs certain acts in his human nature which kind of correspond to the divine efficacy so we speak at the devout about the divine efficacy as as the divine efficiency saint thomas uses that language and tertia para's question 48 article six but then he'll talk about the human contribution as kind of like the the human element of this divine efficacy so his his his sacred humanity is associated with his divine work as its instrument and so what the lord does by merit what he does by satisfaction what he does by sacrifice what he does by redemption all are invested with this kind of divine efficacy um but we we would talk about it principally in terms of what the lord does in his intellect and in his will so he knows us on the cross he chooses our salvation he offers himself to the father as a pleasing sacrifice to make you know satisfaction for the debt of sin and punishment which we incurred in original sin but that this this choice right this act of intellect and will resonates through his body and so even his precious blood is an expression of this human dimension of a divine efficacy but you'll kind of want to take them all together and speak about it in principled sense as a matter of god giving god that's just what salvation is god gives us god but he he translates it through the humanity of our lord jesus christ such that every dimension of our humanity which he assumes is touched is is transformed by it so if christ skins his knee accidentally we wouldn't talk about that as like invested with the divine purpose in the same way as the passion death and resurrection so but there's still a sense in which it's saving insofar as christ takes to himself every aspect of our human experience consonant with the communication of salvation so when christ is you know presented in the temple when he's lost to his parents when he preaches on the mount of beatitudes you know all of these things have a saving dimension but we would talk about salvation kind of coming to its climax in the paschal mystery because god intended that it be such so all of his all of his deeds and suffering save us but there's a kind of concentration of salvation in the paschal mystery because god has ordained it that way so by virtue of the divine choice it takes on the shape okay yeah that's good uh let's see here william crowett says what are some of the vices you find young catholics today are particularly susceptible to in this society climate culture how can we combat these vices within ourselves and correct each other with charity what do you think i mean it sounds boring but like sexual sins yeah also sloth yeah something i've been thinking about more and more is how leisure takes effort dissociating is easy and um i think we often think of sloth as a sort of couch potato doing nothing but it can just be distracting ourselves to death to avoid doing what we ought to be doing i think that's probably a big thing as well yeah yeah yeah i would say sloth is probably more insidious insofar as it's a more serious sin and it really gets at it gets at the root of what animates our efforts to respond to the grace of god you know yeah so so saint thomas will describe sloth as a kind of sorrow at the divine good because it seems unattainable so you know maybe you hear preached you're destined for a life of beatitude god wants you to be happy god wills that you overcome the habitual sins in your life and you hear those things and you're like yeah not for me and that just descends upon your soul as a kind of paralysis a spiritual paralysis like you said it might be expressed as a kind of frenzied running to and fro so as to um fill up what is lacking in your experience of human relationships or a relationship with god so you you busy yourself so you don't have to confront that emptiness right so yeah i think that's a real problem and i think that there are many things about modern life which conduce to sloth and i think that the availability of a lot of content that is passively consumed as part of that story um so like netflix it's just fascinating that people talk about a show becoming available on a certain date with the expectation that you watch all of it within a day or two uh it's like you can push pause on your life when a television show comes out it's very fascinating um and i don't say that like fascinating is a euphemism for i'm judging you right now but it's just it's kind of wild it used to be that you know these things were serialized and now they're just binged um so there's a kind of lack of balance i think that comes with content gluttony specifically like passive content gluttony so maybe one of the ways by which to confront it is to meditate more upon and to exercise more one's agency to think about oneself as the protagonist because there's also things in our ambient culture which really suggest that you're not the protagonist you're just the victim so if you can't be the hero of the story the next best thing to be is the victim because the victim has a kind of power the victim can make other people uh kind of quaver in fear yeah you know because if you if you claim some sort of oppression you can really ruin the lives of those who wrought it but i think that we want to step back into the role of protagonist you've been dealt a certain hand it's for us to play that hand even if that hand isn't ideal or even if there are things about that hand that we would wish at the moment otherwise and so like what does it mean to be an agent what does it mean to be a protagonist and um i i don't know if people have seen the movie tenant which came out is the first one that came out at the beginning of the pandemic but there's a real cool meditation on what it means to be the protagonist in there i mean the main character's name is just the protagonist he is not named otherwise and while we may feel ourselves to be done unto by life we can still engage it in a way that's meaningful even if thin you know even if it doesn't look like you can be an astronaut or you can change your reality to reflect your desire you know that that might not be the case but you can still do something that's as far as god gives you i'm a big fan of jordan peterson and he does a good job i think of expressing the natural virtues that we've seen to have forgotten and one of those things he says is what's something you could do that you will do that will make your life better i love how he phrases that yeah and like when you think about the way the st thomas talks about fraternal correction there's this uh realistic idea at the heart of it or there's a realism to it or he'll ask basically can this person change does this thing matter we're asking these types of questions before we say this is bad i will correct it just robotically with a frustrated anger you know does this matter can this person change and i think when we ask those questions of ourself we need to be responsive to the grace of god rather than just saying ideally i look like this tomorrow you know i'll set about it it's like ah yeah yeah you know grond james thanks for being a patron says my best friend is hindu and interested in learning more about catholicism where can i find a good information or good information that compares the two religions i don't know that specific thing that would compare the two i don't know yeah but if he's interested in learning more about catholicism what would you suggest um so mystic institute yeah there you go yeah right i would say there's some basic kind of christian apologetics which i think a lot of people have found super helpful like mere christianity i'm i'm i'm all for the popular at the outset yeah and um it's a great book i like i don't recommend gk chesterton's orthodoxy for instance because i think it's just playful yeah it's annoying it's just kind of cray cray so being with a friend who's continually sarcastic and you can't tell which is being yeah it's not a bonaventure um so yeah i'd start with mere christianity honestly i just read a lot of c.s lewis problem of pain for instance or screw tape letters they just give you a good christian world view as it were they kind of introduce you to it but by indirection or obliquely james mckee says if you could recommend one practice for the body or book if you prefer one for the soul and one for the mind what would they be one practice hey so body soul and mind yes so i what would i say body brush your teeth yeah that's a great one uh i would say don't look at your uh so one practice for the body is set your alarm on something other than your phone because when you set it on your phone you typically pick it up at the end of the night to change it and then you typically go to espn.com and find out who's doing what in the olympics and then you're all of a sudden devastated the us placed second in the gymnastics preliminaries and then you're just clicking on you know did simone biles do as well as she ought to have in the vault and i know that she had this real cool trait and then 22 minutes later you're like i didn't care about gymnastics 22 minutes ago but now i'm very much brought up or like kind of wrapped up in the concern thereof and i think that for me the big thing is get sleep for your body get sleep i think life is difficult as it is i don't think you need to make it more difficult by being constantly exhausted so get sleep and one way to get sleep is set your alarm on something other than your phone when it comes to your soul i for me mind and soul is just answers to the same question because the powers of the soul among which the mind is included are the kind of how the soul is given expression so one thing for your soul i would say is forgive and that's exceedingly difficult and i think that it takes work and it takes daily work but if you find yourself bound up with sadness and anger directed at another human being you have to choose to forgive that human being and you have to choose to forgive that human being basically every day until such times you find yourself no longer better so i was going to ask you because people say forgiveness isn't a feeling it's a decision but sometimes we make the decision and still feel as upset as we did at the moment before we made that decision and so have we really made the decision and i think it's a decision that has to be ratified like you chose to bring children into the world but that's a decision that you have to ratify every day because you're like i could take them out of the world and will unless they start behaving okay yeah that's really good this is funny patricia miller father pine i'll always hold your mum in great esteem for her butterscotch pancake recipe carly's mum do you know what that means i don't know does she make good pancakes my mom makes killer butterscotch pancakes yeah chances of her having made that up is unlikely it's super unlikely she makes the best licorice she doesn't dan lindstrom says father pine does an awesome job of explaining the ordinary way of sanctity what amounts what amount of esteem or regard should we give to the extraordinary like miracles healings in charismatic groups or speaking in tongues and prophesying right so saint thomas talks about the charismatic gifts and secunda secunda questions 171 through 178. that whole section questions 171 through 189 are dedicated to those things which pertain to some but not to all so in the second second questions 1 through 170 are dedicated to those things which pertain to all and that's where he describes the life of virtue and then subsequently he describes the charismatic gifts states of life or lives as it were contemplative and active and then states of perfection the episcopacy and religious life and he says this just pertains to some so those charismatic gifts which are listed in first corinthians 12 which are described by saint thomas as grazier gratis date which is grace is freely given so as to distinguish them from grazia gratum faciens grace making pleasing or sanctifying grace are things that are given to the individual for the upbuilding of the church so they have a good end obviously i'm like here validating in the sense of saying yeah absolutely so they have a good end but it's not necessary that each be given them um and they're not necessarily for one's own personal sanctification so i think that in the order of charity you're responsible for the worship of god your own sanctification and then those who come next those who immediately pertain to your good like members of your family or those who are in your pastoral care etc and i think that once you kind of go down in the order of charity you begin to entertain this question of what what gifts has the lord given me for the upbuilding of the church and how do i best exercise them so i think it's good to want to cultivate certain charismatic gifts like tongues interpretation of tongues prophecy word of wisdom word of knowledge mighty deeds etc and st thomas gives beautiful explanations of those things in those questions 171-178 i think there's a kind of danger of focusing exclusively or inordinately on them and you might encounter that in some communities but i think a lot of the charismatic settings where i myself have worshipped specifically in college at steubenville i think that it's done well i think that it's done beautifully but it all ought ultimately to lead back to a sense of the contemplative end of christian life the primacy or importance of sanctifying grace and cultivating sanctifying grace so i think it's good to have a kind of holy esteem for these things to be open to the lord's gift of them even to pray in prayer groups in such a way that you might more readily receive them they're outpouring but within that setting within that context here's a good question i know a lot of people have it comes from dorian walker he says father pine if loving means willing the good of the other and we're meant to love god how do we will god's good given that there is no good that god doesn't already possess or is love for god best expressed by some word other than agape right so that's a great question and i think that the basic example is you will that god be god right so you can think about in the way it's expressed in the our father thy kingdom come thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven um you're not praying that it come about as if god needed you to pray that it come about right nor are you trying to change god's mind you know we've talked about this in the context of conversations about prayer prayer isn't about you being the one on whom it all depends prayer is about god sharing with you in the unfolding of his wonderful plan and so i think that when we talk about willing god's goodness or loving god we're talking about it more after the manner of affirmation than we are about giving him something that he lacks so when saint thomas even talks about god's will he'll distinguish the way in which god wills from the way that we will so when we will we typically go out to a thing that we lack as a way by which to assimilate it or when we love you know so i love you know butterscotch pancakes let's bring it around i go out to butterscotch pancakes so that i eat them and then they become part of me and then they are subsequently expressed as energy or as a nap whereas god loves not because he lacks the thing towards which he inclines but because love just issues spontaneously from intellect right so when you know a thing you are inclined toward the kind of expression of that thing not in the sense that you desire it as lacking but in the sense that it spills over so i think that when we talk about our willing the good to god we don't will it to him as something that he lacks but we have to reaffirm him to be good so god wills himself and we are invited into or caught up in god's willing of himself yeah yeah great stuff there oh that's funny we've talked about this dominic asks father pine what techniques do you utilize to remember what you read you've sort of addressed that but if you want to have another shot at it the big thing for me is outlining and then what do you mean outlining so when i read a book i will highlight and annotate and then i'll go back through the book and then i'll take notes on it but not just notes in the sense of write down every usable word but try to summarize it so for instance when i'm writing my dissertation i'll read a text i'll identify those things in the text that are helpful and then i'll go back and i'll just do my own version of the things in those things that i find helpful and then i'll just put you know john even nicolas said this in reaction you know page 38 and then i'll make outlines of what i want to say in the chapter that i'm writing and i'll come to that point and i'll be like okay i want to say something about this and i feel like i have a good sense of what i wrote down here but maybe i'll appeal back to the text to say exactly what he said but i'm always trying to put it in my words like i'm always trying to wow that's a weird image that occurred to my mind was like like a mama bird pre-masticating worms to feed them to her baby chicks and you're like yeah exactly um so i'm trying to interiorize it and i'm trying to kind of teach myself so i'm i'm cognizing i'm not just a typewriter i'm not just a scribe i'm not just a court reporter bailiff i'm engaged right so i think that when i'm processing text i'm doing it as one i'm trying to do it as one who's engaged and then it helps then to teach it it helps to preach it it helps to journal about it so i think insofar as you can be the protagonist of your intellectual work you're more likely to retain it there's a guy here jacob imam i don't know if you know him yeah just heard about him oh great guy he uh his godfather was a secretary for c.s lewis and so at jacob's house he has a copy of the divine comedy and it's from c.s lewis and it's all the pages have been written on the back and front have been complete it's pretty neat all right let's let's do one more question here from joseph fierro he says as somebody who finds the extraordinary form and the eastern divine liturgy tremendously beautiful and helpful for worship sometimes i wonder if i'm worshiping worship instead of itself rather than worshiping god how do we know whether an attraction to a particular liturgy is genuinely helping us worship god or if we are turning it into an idol yeah i'd say just take the criteria from the first letter of saint john which is say do you love your brother i think that's got a cash out there so i think love so hanzo's on balthazar says that love alone is credible and i think that the way that saint thomas describes the life of grace he says you can't know insofar as it's immaterial it's invisible you can't know whether you're in a state of grace but there are certain evidential signs so are you drawn to prayer are you making good use of the sacraments are you engaged in good christian friendships do you have a modicum of penance in your life are you studying the faith do you love the blessed virgin mary are you faithful in your commitments are you becoming more so thus that and the other not just in the sense of self-improvement project but do you have some experiences of being kind of born on by the life of grace or do you find yourself becoming more embittered more angry more sad more vengeful more etc etc etc and if the answer is yes to the latter consideration then maybe this is part of the story not necessarily but your spiritual life is going to require some revisiting in conversation with your friends your family maybe with a priest um but uh but yeah if things continue to grow then i think that you can have confidence that you are where you are terrific yeah and then finally why are you in steubenville are you just here for a vacation yeah there's a bible conference starting this friday nice an apologetics conference this weekend not going how long are you here for i'm here for three days sweet just hanging out cool well thank you kindly for being on the show and that is it god bless you [Music] do [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Pints With Aquinas

Views: 25,774

Rating: 4.9600725 out of 5

Keywords: aquinas, catholicism, catholic, pints with aquinas, matt fradd, theology, debate, religion, st. thomas aquinas, thomas aquinas, philosophy

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Length: 133min 36sec (8016 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 27 2021